About

COLLISION is an outreach project by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP). CoEPP physicists work on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.

COLLISION began in 2012, as a competition for visual/ comic book/ graphic/ filmic (YouTube/ Vimeo) representation of particle physics as seen by artists, students and scientists. Entries were exhibited online, and selected entries were exhibited in the Planetarium at Scienceworks and published in a zine, distributed by Express Media
Coincidentally, 2012 is the same year that particle physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) discovered the Higgs boson.

In 2015 the theme is

“the Large Hadron Collider has restarted… what will we find this time?”

Categories and Prizes
— High school and primary school student category
— Open category The winner of the High school and primary school student category will receive a $500 cash prize and $1,000 for their school’s science program Winner of the Open category will receive a $1,500 cash prize.

A selection of multimedia/ short film and print entries will be included in a visual art exhibition at RiAus; and selected entries will be published in CSIRO’s Double Helix magazine.

We’re entering New Physics, and we want YOU to tell us what it will look like… what new discoveries will be made and what could these discoveries lead to.

Some things to think about

The particle accelerator that was used to find the Higgs boson has just had a total upgrade and now has the capacity to operate at double the energy. What will it find?
What is dark matter and WHY is there so much of it?
A NEW linear collider is in planning – what will this discover?

The Collision competition and gallery is your opportunity to imagine…
Comic artists, visual artists, short film makers, animators and creatives of all types are encouraged to submit your artworks to the Collision website.

Find out more! Watch this:

The Hugest, massivest most ginormous experiment in the world…

The Hugest, massivest most ginormous experiment in the world… is at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This particle accelerator, is around 100m underground, beneath Switzerland and France. Physicists use it to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. Two beams of subatomic particles travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. The two beams collide head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world sift through all the data; bump up the energy a notch and then do it all again!

Did you know?

Scientists from across Australia work on the ATLAS experiment. ATLAS itself has over three thousand physicists from 174 universities in 38 countries.

The ATLAS experiment looks at the remains of high-energy proton-proton collisions that occur in the Large Hadron Collider.

The ATLAS detector is 46 metres long, 25 metres high 25 metres wide and weighs 7,000 tonnes. It has six different detecting subsystems and a huge magnet system that bends the paths of charged particles for momentum measurement.